I'm not a really religious person. We consider ourselves to be Catholics, but we think of it more as a cultural thing. But what I love about Ted's story, at least about Ted's family, is that the Bible got them through. They read the Bible. They would read these passages, and it moved me. I went out and bought a new Bible. When I was making Friends with God, everybody quoted the Bible, but I was never inspired to go buy one. But this experience with Ted turned me onto the Bible in a whole new way, because he would read these passages and it would really inspire me.

People might come away from this movie being a little anti-church, but it makes you really pro-Bible. It makes you really pro-God in a way, because you read these things in the Bible and you're like, wow.

Andrea Pelosi in a CT interview about her documentary, THE TRIALS OF TED HAGGARD

Whatever in our present success mere Fashion has given us, mere Fashion will presently withdraw. The real conversions will remain: but nothing else will. In that sense we may be on the brink of a real and permanent Christian revival: but it will work slowly and obscurely and in small groups. The present sunshine (if I may so call it) is certainly temporary. The grain must be got into the barns before the wet weather comes.
This mutability is the fate of all movements, fashions, intellectual climates and the like. But a Christian movement is always up against something sterner than the mere fickleness of taste....The enemy has not yet thought it worth while to fling his whole weight against us. But he soon will....Neither our armour nor our enemies' is yet engaged. Combatants always tend to imagine that the war is further on that it really is.

C.S. Lewis. "The Decline of Religion" in GOD IN THE DOCK.

Our Lord trusted no man, yet He was never suspicious, never bitter. Our Lord's confidence in God and what His grace could do for any man, was so perfect that he despaired of no one. If your trust is place in human beings, we shall end in despairing of everyone.

Oswald Chambers. MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST. July 30.

When we think about the remarkably early age at which the young men went up to university in, let us say, Tudor times, and thereafter were held fit to assume responsibility for the conduct of their own affairs, are we altogether comfortable about that artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so marked in our own day? To postpone the acceptance of responsibility to a late date brings with it a number of psychological complications which, while they may interest the psychiatrist, are scarcely beneficial either to the individual or to society....

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

Dorothy Sayers. THE LOST TOOLS OF LEARNING.

From his father...[Bonhoffer] learned, what characterizes all that he wrote, an insitent realism, a "turning away from the phraseological to the real." For him Christianity could never be merely intellectual theory, doctrine divorced from life, or mystical emotion, but always it must be responsible, obedient action, the discipleship of Christ in every situation of concrete everday life, personal and public. And it was this that led him in the end to prison and death. Six years before his imprisonment by the Gestapo he had written, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."

John Doberstein in the introduction to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's LIFE TOGETHER

We have no conception of what God is aiming at, and as we go on it gets more and more vague. God's aim looks like missing the mark because we are too short-sighted to see what he is aiming at. (Aug. 3)

The main thing about Christianity is not the work we do, but the relationship we maintain and the atmosphere produced by that relationship. (Aug. 4)

Oswald Chambers. MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST.

We do not fight in order to win because in Christ we have already won. Overcomers are those who rest in the victory already given to them by their God....If we believe the Lord, we shall not pray so much but rather we shall praise him more.

Watchman Nee. SIT, WALK, STAND.

Sooner or later you figure out life is constructed specifically and brilliantly to squeeze a man into association with the Owner of heaven.

Donald Miller. THROUGH PAINTED DESERTS: LIGHT, GOD, AND BEAUTY ON THE OPEN ROAD.